Other images, when compared to evidence from earlier years, will help experts gauge the rate of the wreck's deterioration.Įxpedition Titanic will gather hard data too, for example by measuring the thickness of the ship's hull and by hauling up and examining experimental steel platforms placed at the site. Some photos will reveal never before seen parts of Titanic, organizers say. (Explore a 2004 photomosaic of the Titanic wreck.) Thousands of high-resolution photos and video will be combined with acoustic and sonar mapping data to form a 3-D replica of the site, allowing scientists and armchair explorers to probe it in detail. The ship's bow and stern separated before sinking and now lie a third of a mile (half a kilometer) apart. The 20-day Expedition Titanic will use remotely operated submersibles to complete an unprecedented archaeological analysis of the two- by three-mile (three- by five-kilometer) debris field, including Titanic's two halves. (Related: "Titanic Was Found During Secret Cold War Navy Mission.") "We're trying to bring the actual hard data to the people who can make those determinations," Lange said. The goal: to virtually preserve Titanic in its current state and to finally determine just how far gone the shipwreck is, and how long it might last. John's, Newfoundland (map)-roughly 350 miles (560 kilometers) from the ship's 2.4-mile-deep (3.8-kilometer-deep) resting place ( Titanic wreck-site map). With Lange as optical-survey leader, a new expedition sets sail Sunday from St.
"But others say it's going to be there for hundreds of years." "Some people think the bow will collapse in a year or two," Lange said. "Everyone has their own opinion" as to how long Titanic will remain more or less intact, said research specialist Bill Lange of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. (Watch an animation of Titanic's iceberg collision, breakup, and sinking.) Now, scientists say, the legendary liner-beset by metal-eating life-forms, powerful currents, and possibly even human negligence-could be vanishing for good.Īlready explorers have documented caved-in roofs, weakening decks, a stern perhaps on the edge of collapse, and the disappearance of Titanic's crow's nest-from which lookout Frederick Fleet spotted history's most infamous iceberg.
Titanic famously disappeared from view until 1985, when it was rediscovered on the bottom of the North Atlantic ( pictures of Titanic's rediscovery). Slipping beneath the waves on April 15, 1912, the R.M.S.
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